Twelve Grimmauld Place
by Lady Altair
Summary: It's a good house for lonely people.


_Twelve Grimmauld Place_

_

* * *

  
_

Hestia Jones doesn't fall apart until she's waved goodbye to Megan and made her way back to Grimmauld Place.

She puts Sirius to shame with her pacing, ripping through the decrepit old house in a panic. "Where _is _he?" she keeps saying, dragging her fingers through her hair until it's loose from the professional twist, worrying the pewter buttons on the cuffs of her sleeves until they come loose. Neat, impeccable Hestia is a harried mess, her heels clicking up and down the unpolished hardwood floors until the noise of it nearly drives Sirius mad.

"Jesus, Hestia, calm down," he grits through his teeth with as much empathy as he can manage, catching her by the sleeve as she strides past him in the kitchen. "He'll turn up, I'm sure."

"Sturgis doesn't just _not _show up to things," Hestia says around the cuff of her sleeve—in the absence of buttons to pick at, she's chewing on the starched white fabric.

"They'll find him, everyone's out looking," he tries to assure her. "He'll come back."

Her hand drops to her side as she looks at him. Her teeth are white against the pink stain remnant of her berry lipstick; her bright blue eyes wide beneath perfectly fanned black lashes. She looks helpless.

And then she says, very simply, "Caradoc didn't." Her voice is quiet, a mere breath of sound.

He's waiting for tears, because that's the woman he remembers from the periphery of before. But she just turns away and braces herself over the sink. The sound of the incoming floo in the parlor is like an electric shock to her body, and she sprints in her spindly heels, in a graceful years-practiced lope, to greet the news, of whatever sort there is to be had.

* * *

She spends a lot more time in Grimmauld, with Sturgis in Azkaban.

Hestia Jones is a highlight to how unkind the years have been to the last two Marauders. She's a few years older than the two, and looks a decade younger. She's better looking than he remembers; in her twenties, she was a little too thin and little too fussy in her dress. The gaunt, tight age of Azkaban that he sees in the mirror, the lined, heavy-eyed weariness he sees in Remus…there is none of that in Hestia. Her skin is clean and powder-perfect, her eyes bright beneath her tastefully done makeup, her steps quick and shoulders light--she must carry all her worry some other way, because it isn't weight on her back like it is on the others. She walks with her head high and her hair perfectly styled.

It's almost painful to look at her; she wears so little of her tragedy in her appearance, it's easy to forget. It's easy to resent her, almost, beautiful and light shouldered, when she walks out the door into the sunshine (or even the grey-ceilinged London rain), a free and beautiful bird.

One afternoon, both of them dusty from the continued campaign on the decrepit old house, she directs him to retrieve her wand from her handbag in the kitchen. It's in a case in the bottom of the leather bag on the kitchen table; rolled up along with her beautifully scrolled lilac wood wand is a worn old note. It's addressed to 'my hummingbird' and signed 'Caradoc.' He doesn't read the rest.

He's a little kinder to Hestia for the rest of the day, keeps the bite of his bitterness back, doesn't resent her when she retrieves her bag from the kitchen and leaves. It's easier to understand the way she carries herself, her shoulders light and chin held up; she carries her pain in her handbag.

* * *

She doesn't come to Grimmauld over Christmas—she spends the holidays with her daughter at Caradoc's parents' house in Beaumaris. She takes the time to wish him a happy Christmas before she goes to Kings Cross to meet Megan at Platform 9 ¾. It would be a lie to say that he misses her—the house is busy and Harry is more than enough of a distraction.

But he still listens for the unique double-click of her high heels on the entrance hall. A few hours after the Hogwarts Express leaves, they sound in the hall.

Her Christmas gift is a file wrapped in tissue paper. "It's how I'm going to clear your name, when, well, you know. I'm going to get you a lot of money, too, for wrongful imprisonment." A sour look crosses her face. "If fucking Barty Crouch hadn't suspended due process in the end, you never would've gone—I've been looking at these witness accounts." She snatches the file back out of his hand, ripping the remains of the tissue away and paging through the parchment inside. "They are by no means conclusive. And your wand! A simple _Priori Incantatum_ would've cleared you of responsibility!"

He can't help but grin at her. "I don't need the money, Hestia."

A playful grin plasters itself on her face. "I'm gonna get it anyway, just because I can. I'm _that _good," she assures him. "And it'll teach the Ministry to go dicking about with people's rights. I'll get you off if it's the last thing I do!"

Sirius snickers, and Hestia whacks him. "Get your mind out of the gutter, Black! Don't be crass!" They laugh together.

She leaves the file. It's not a bad Christmas gift; it's hope, it's a life beyond this house, beyond the fight. Most of it is too dry and legal for him to really comprehend, but in the darker hours in Grimmauld alone he sifts through the papers and it's a little easier to smile.

* * *

She breaks up with the boyfriend he didn't even know she had in mid-January. He breaks out a bottle of his father's prized wine and they talk about love over it.

"Not 'the one'?" he asks her, a little sarcastically. She just looks at him appraisingly before speaking.

"Already have my 'one.' Just waiting around for him to get back," she says simply, swirling the sediment around in the bottom of her glass. Sirius falls a little awkwardly silent, thinking back to the note in her wand case.

"Not Caradoc," she says gently, her hand reaching out to brush reassuringly against his. She laughs a little sadly. "I'm not so sad as to be waiting around for him still—I'm talking about Sturgis. He's been my best friend since eleven—if that's not once in a lifetime, I don't know what is."

After a moment, she speaks again, a little hesitantly, a little desperately. "Sirius…what is Azkaban like?"

His throat seizes painfully and he pulls away from her. "Don't ask me that, Hestia."

Tears well up in her china-blue eyes, the first he's ever seen. "I'm sorry, I just—he's not going to come back the same, is he?"

He locks himself into the room with Buckbeak, not that she tries to come after him. He can still hear her heels clicking in the entrance hall when she goes a few minutes later.

* * *

A few days after she takes an Azkaban-ravaged Sturgis home, she's back in Grimmauld Place. She brings her own alcohol, some fancy, imported rum. She leaves it in her handbag, unopened. She's dressed too casually to be recognizable—still neat, still put together, but her black hair is loose and he can't recognize her footsteps because her shoes are flat.

"I feel like I'm failing him," she says blankly, arms crossed on the table, cheek set into her elbow, looking up at him across the table. "I don't know how to help…I just—I don't know. I've taken off work, I've tried to be there…he doesn't want me around. He just goes out drinking at night and goes home with strangers, stumbles in around noon and barely has a word for me."

She looks sad and burdened, worried for her 'once in a lifetime'. She doesn't seem untouchable, like she always has. It's the first time Sirius can believe she's three years older than he. He can't bring himself to tell her about the post-Azkaban haze of apathy, before all those years of happy memories start to trickle back, when all you can remember is everything you would rather forget.

Her hair is spilled across the wood tabletop and he pets it in an awkward attempt at comfort. Her hand comes up to his and she smiles at him wanly. They sit like that awhile, there at the table.

* * *

It isn't love or even lust that leads them into his unmade bed upstairs. It's loneliness, the kind that children's letters and damaged best friends can't quite assuage.

Hestia laughs at the pinups on his walls, twenty-year-old Muggle beauty. "You're going to be disappointed," she teases gently, her hand in his hair. "Babies do irreparable damage." Her hair is fanned out against the pillow, her shirt undone just a single button past decent, blush rose lace just barely peeking out.

"Azkaban isn't much kinder," he replies, and the playfulness drops. He regrets the words—it was meant as an awkward apology for all the beauty those years stole from him, an awkward compliment to Hestia's cream and curved prettiness. Her hands are gentle on his shoulders as she draws him down. Her neck is warm against his forehead and they just lay there for a moment. Her heart beats through the crisp fabric, her arms a light weight on his shoulder blades, her fingers lacing through the fine hair at the nape of his neck. It's innocent, gentle—the comfort of a mother to her child. And he's never had this before.

It's not love, but it's peace and warmth and comfort. His pillow smells like her the next night and the nightmares aren't so terrible.

* * *

There's too much to think about in the end as he falls—death is a Dementor in reverse, it takes away the misery and leaves everything beautiful. There's James' hand on his shoulder, Lily's smile, Remus' embrace in the Shrieking Shack, Harry's letters.

But Hestia finds her way in amongst the rest, because falling asleep in her arms that one night is the only analogy he can find for death in his entire life—quick and peaceful and warm.


End file.
